Sentence Structure Assessment Technology

Promulgation of Plagiarism

Plagiarism has been in play since the genesis of formalized education, thus the probability exists that there always will remain students or individuals who plagiarize. With the inception of the Internet, the promulgation of this form of cheating has exploded and has made it imperative for teachers and other facilitators to combat it effectively. Understanding what plagiarism is, how to prevent it, and devising innovative technologies to detect it can help address this problem.

It must also be asserted that, no single software tool or technological-innovation will help deter this problem completely. Educationists, as well as ethicists need to educate students and individuals on the amoral aspects of plagiarism. Having said this, one should exercise caution when suspecting or accusing anyone of plagiarism, innocent mistakes, as well as genuine incidents of similar use may easily exist. Therefore, what should be investigated is repetitive behavior and patterns of deliberate deception.

Conventional methods of plagiarism detection

Even though many instructors are aware of the problems of plagiarism, they feel powerless or are simply unwilling to address it. TechWeb News published an article from a Stanford University professor who admitted that instructors are aware of students plagiarizing their work but are unwilling to investigate the matter, according to him; few are willing to search through the vast expanse of the internet to hunt down suspect work.

To address this problem various tools were developed during the late 90’s. Software, such as “Plagiarism-Finder” (M4-Software), “EVE2” (Canexus), “YAP” (University of Sydney), “SCAM” (Stanford University) are the more prominent ones. The main drawback of these programs is that they rely excessively on search engines to find suspect writing. A technique which is inherently flawed, since most search engines only account for just 16% of the billions of websites making up the internet today. Another facet which exploits this approach is the use of password-protected websites, the software cannot access such sites and thus the plagiarized work remains largely undetected.

To counter this, universities started developing and populating their own databases of copyrighted and published papers against which the programs were modified to work. This too proved insufficient since cheating software has concurrently evolved, mainly taking the form of ‘automatic paraphrasing’, whereby thesauruses are utilized to change words and sentence structures to avoid detection by conventional softwares which rely on string-matching to catch suspect sentences. To address this, a more robust and comprehensive approach was needed.

New technique to combat plagiarism

CheckForPlagiarism.net was developed in 2004 and is a result of a dedicated team of professors, programmers, teachers and students who came together to design and codify a product which will help combat plagiarism while maintaining students', individuals' and professionals' intellectual property and privacy. They started working on a new technology, “Sentence Structure Assessment”, implemented at CheckForPlagiarism.net. Now in it’s eighth year of development, the technology works on innovative and powerful algorithms which create a "digital snapshot" of each paper. It operates in a series of steps:

The software initially marks and identifies the sentence and paragraph structure in the submitted document.

This structure is cross-referenced against a database of billions of publications collected from major universities, academic and professional databases and paper-mills, worldwide.

The snapshot is simultaneously sent to crawlers who scour the World Wide Web for possible matches.

Finally, the gathered results (sources and color-matched content) is compiled in an easy to read plagiarism report.

The copyrighted sentence structure assessment technology was developed to combat the most creative attempts of plagiarism. Its strength lies in its ability to rank papers on not just string matching or sentence structure but also on a percentage of synonyms used against a suspect source. The technology service employs its own thesauruses on submitted papers and matches them against published material or sources in its own vast database and the internet.

To exhibit and understand the methodology of sentence structure mapping and assessment, consider the following hypothetical case (sourced from Google and Wikipedia). The first paper, (Paper 1), is an excerpt of an internet derived document, the chapter-3 introductory paragraph from Oscar Wilde's, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The second, (Paper 2), is a test document, using added text, being tested for plagiarism. While the third (Paper 3) is the same paragraph with extensive synonyms used. The modified and added content in Paper 2 and Paper 3 are highlighted in different shades of red.

Paper 1 (original)

At half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor, a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him. His father had been our ambassador at Madrid when Isabella was young, and Prim unthought of, but had retired from the Diplomatic Service in a capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his despatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure.

Paper 2 (added text)

Oscar Wilde's, The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine. An excerpt from the book, at the beginning of Chapter 3. Wilde later revised this edition, making several alterations, and adding new chapters; the amended version was published by Ward, Lock, and Company in April 1891. At half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor, a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him. The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. His father had been our ambassador at Madrid when Isabella was young, and Prim unthought of, but had retired from the Diplomatic Service in a capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his despatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.

Paper 3 (paraphrased / modified text)

At half noon next day Lord Henry Wotton walked from Curzon street over to the Albany to visit his uncle, Lord Fermor, an amiable if somewhat cranky old bachelor, whom society called self-centered because it derived no specific benefit from him, but who was considered generous by the world as he fed the people who pleased him. His father had been our diplomat at Madrid when Isabella was youthful and puritanical unthought of, but had retired from the Diplomatic Service in a whimsical moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris, a position to which he considered that he deserved by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his despatches, and his excessive passion for pleasure.

Results

Both instances (Papers 2 and 3) of plagiarism were successfully caught through document fingerprinting techniques while the other software, making use of conventional detection techniques, were fooled. It is important to remember there is no definitive or guaranteed software or technique of detection out there which is absolutely fool-proof, but new creative innovations, driven by an intense concern due to plagiarism are making it harder for plagiarists to get away with cheating.

Implementation

Academic institutions and research houses around the globe have started implementing this new technique of detecting and rooting out plagiarism. Students and writers no longer submit their work directly to the instructor or publisher; instead, they submit it to these fingerprinting engines. The software in turn generates a report of its findings and makes it available to the instructor or other concerned authority.

Usage

The software works in an efficient new way (as mentioned above). Universities and academic institutions first have to license it, and then implement it. Next, instructors can submit documents online, while students are then required to submit using this software, by uploading it to the website. The software runs its unique algorithm on it, checks it from its vast database, as well as through the internet and makes the results available to the instructor with a comprehensive color-coded plagiarism report of the submitted document. This alteration over conventional document submission norm helps save time, as well as arming the instructor with irrefutable proof of any plagiarism detected.

If the submitted document is cited incorrectly, or not cited at all, our software can still detect the sources used and identify them in the plagiarism report. This provides an opportunity for the submitter to correct his/her document before finalizing it.

Our plagiarism report is extremely easy to read. Highlighting all 'offending' content in a submitted document for easy corrections. We are so confident in the ability of our service, that we offer a full money-back guarantee.

CheckForPlagiarism.net is backed by a full money-back guarantee, that is how confident we are in the ability of our service and the strength of our plagiarism checking engine. Our service is currently in use by thousands of students, teachers, educators, academic, and professional institutions world-wide.

In addition to institutional accounts, we enjoy the confidence of over 100,000 individual accounts (including students, lawyers, doctors, educationists, etc.), who utilize our service on a daily basis. In conclusion, we'd simply like to say this, give us a risk-free trial today, we guarantee you won't be disappointed!